A fantastical tale that’s somewhere between Lewis Carroll and Terry Pratchett, Cathrynne Valente’s book follows twelve-year-old September, a girl from Omaha, Nebraska, who finds herself whisked away by a fast-talking gentleman called the Green Wind to the world of Fairyland where she has to retrieve a witch’s spoon from the fickle Marquess.

This is the story of a place that never was: the kingdom of Prester John, the utopia described by an anonymous, twelfth-century document which captured the imagination of the medieval world and drove hundreds of lost souls to seek out its secrets, inspiring explorers, missionaries, and kings for centuries. But what if it were all true?

For two years, Catherynne M. Valente has been sending stories out into the wild. Every month, for twenty-four months, a new tale has appeared in mailboxes all over the world.

Here, for the first time, these stories have been brought together in a single anthology. Two years of detectives, fairy tales, frost giants, lost moon colonies, furies and minotaurs. Two years of magic.

Accompanied by fantastical illustrations created by the subscribers of the project, these hitherto unpublished stories paint a landscape of fiction, family, and a new kind of connection between author and reader.

A Guide to Folktales in Fragile DialectsA Guide To Folktales In Fragile Dialects is a collection of poetry, short fables, and fairy tales that explore myth and wonder, ancient and modern, with an introduction by Midori Snyder.Download Ebook (PDF, 587 K) direct – $2.99 USD:

PalimpsestFour strangers are bound together in adventure, love and occasional sorrow in this parable from Tiptree winner Valente (The Orphan’s Tales). The city of Palimpsest exists somewhere outside our reality, accessible only during the sleep that follows sex.Buy from Amazon.com:
(Kindle Edition)

The Orphan’s Tales: In The Night GardenA lonely girl with a dark tattoo across her eyelids made up of words spelling out countless tales unfolds a fabulous, recursive Arabian Nights-style narrative of stories within stories in this first of a new fantasy series from Valente.Buy from Amazon.com:
(Kindle Edition)

The Grass-Cutting SwordA re-telling of the Japanese myth of Yamata-no-Orochi, this fragmented, metamorphosed folktale explores the strange landscape of primeval Japan, from the Heaven-Spanning Bridge to the hellish Root-Country, following the troubled trickster Susanoo-no-Mikoto, god of wind and storms, as he is banished from heaven and wanders the earth, lost in human form, in search of his demonic mother and charged with the defeat of an eight-headed serpent… Download Ebook (PDF, 450Kb) direct – $2.99 USD:

Yume No Hon: The Book of Dreams (Blue Edition)The Book of Dreams is the story of a hermit- woman in ancient Japan, who in her solitude dreams herself into strange mythologies. Through Greek, Hawaiian, Egyptian, and Mesopotamian myth, quantum physics, and Buddhist parable, the truth emerges about her nature, and the nature of all women.Download Ebook (PDF, 1.6Mb) direct – $2.99 USD:

Poetry

The Descent of InannaDescent of Inanna is a long-form poem, re-imagining of a mythological katabasis, the descent of Inanna into the otherworld.Download Ebook (PDF, 97Kb) direct – $2.99 USD:

Oracles: A PilgrimageThe Oracles of the ancient world spoke for the gods, they spoke for the future: but they could not speak for themselves. Here, their voices bubble up from the depths, enraged and sardonic, sorrowing and wild, finding themselves on new ground — scattered across the American continent.Download Ebook (PDF, 156Kb) direct – $2.99 USD: